[AUTHOR'S NOTE: without giving away too much, this novel is set in
the home universe of the "Elders", a species of sapient ammonites, or
nautiloids about half a billion years old. The planet is Earth, but a very
different Earth than we know, where the Elders have gathered specimens
of thousands of other sapient species from different branches of reality.

Eichra Oren is human, a "p'Nan debt-assessor", a calling that combines
the functions of detective, rabbi, attorney, judge, jury, and sometimes,
executioner. His companion Samwho is telling the storyis a medium-
sized white dog with cybernetically enhanced intelligence.

Together, they've been investigating a series of events that seem to indicate
that their world is being invaded by creatures from a previously unknown
probability universe.

Oh, yesand Lornis, who is a member of a humanoid species evolved from
Homo denisova, closely resembles Jill St. John. Look her up.]

******

Early the next morning, Eichra Oren and I were awakened by someone
parked in our driveway, insistently and incessantly sounding their
veek's klaxon. On a shelf, my sympathetic sponge (not the same as a
singing sponge), one of the stranger features offered up by nautiloid
civilization, was still the same as I had been last night, road-weary,
cranky and tired, but within a few minutes the sponge was my old self
again.

The boss entered the office at the same moment I did, yawning and
stretching, strapping his swordbelt around the tunic he'd slept in.
Nothingwell, practically nothing, anywaywill make you ache the
next morning like a long journey sitting down. We'd had two of them. I
was wishing I had a sword, myselfnot to mention the hands to swing
it withas the noise continued. I told the house to make us coffee,
hot and black, as we stepped outside to see what the racket was all
about.

It was so bright outside that it hurt my teeth. Out there on the
driveway, standing next to her cute little sky-blue Nombismocwen
hover sportsveek, was Lornis Adubudu, practically jumping up and
down with excitement. Her Talapoin, Mio, by contrast, perched in the
back of the passenger seat indolently examining his fingernails and
yawning. As we came out the door and she saw us, she told her veek to
stop honking, and ran directly to the boss, throwing her arms around
him.

"Surprise!" she cried. "Wait'll you see what I have for you!"

Dressed the way she was, in tight little velour shorts and a well-
filled, filmy, not-quite-transparent topjust above her sandaled
right foot, she wore an anklet of gold chainit was pretty obvious
what she had for Eichra Oren this morning if he'd been inclined to
accept it, but at the moment she was probably referring to something
else.

As annoyed as we both were with Lornis, I had to admit that she
was a highly decorative thing to behold, even this early in the day.
Her auburn hair, no more than a couple of inches long and slightly ...
well, roughened-looking, framed her lovely face perfectly. Her amber
eyes, lit now by the newly-risen sun, spoke of fire and deep passionand
of child-like enthusiasm for whatever had brought her to our
doorstep.

She almost made me wish I were a humanoid.

She took one of Eichra Oren's hands, pulling him toward her veek.
"Your mother told me you've been hunting for'aliens'," she said.
"Aliens. Well, Sweetie, I think I may have something you'll want to
see!"

At the word "aliens" Lornis no longer had to drag him along. He
was at the veek before she was, starting to climb in, but she stopped
him.

"No, nolet me explain, Eichra Oren! You see, I went out in my
flower garden just before sunrise this morning to get nightcrawlers,
so I could go fishing later today with my father. This" The girl
stretched ornamentally, reaching into the back seat of the open-topped
road machine. "This is what I was using. I got it out of my garden
shed."

I'd seen something like it before. What she had hauled out of the
veek was a t-handled, wooden-shafted, fork-ended device about four feet
long, that used high-voltage electricity to bring the worms up from
underground.

"I heard a noise, and then I saw one of these 'aliens' of yours,
rummaging through the other end of my toolshed and guess I sort of
impulsively kind of stabbed it in the backside with my 'nightcrawler
persuader', knocking the thing right out." In any lesser society, we
wouldn't have been able to watch the action she was describing. In
ours, we got to see everything she'd seen, and it was pretty funny
stuff.

With a dramatic flourish, she opened the cargo trunk to show us
what lay inside. It was a Gray, one of the flatworm people, the one
(assuming there was only one) with the little visored cap, wearing a
gray coverall and tied up hand and foot with gray all-purpose tape.
Very tastefully coordinated, I thought. Lornis had stuffed the thing
into the trunk of her veek, and now presented it to my boss proudly,
as a present. I suspected that it might be H. gracilis courting
behavior.

Eichra Oren bent down and stared the organism in what served as
its face. There was no visible mouth or nose, no visible ears. Only
those terrible eyes that looked like holes burned in a blanket with a
cigar. "Do you speak my language?" he asked it. "Can you speak at
all?"

There was no response. It didn't even blink. I wasn't sure if it
could.

To Lornis: "What do you suppose it was looking for in your shed?"

Lornis shrugged. "I've no idea. No idea at all. It's kind of bigthe
shed, I meanand it's been practically empty since my dad
moved out to a place of his own and took all of the stuff he stored
there. What I'm keeping in it now are some garden tools and various
related supplies, a stack of old clay pots, and an ancient automowing
machine."

"I have a thought," I said, and I did. It was a good one. "Boss,
if you and Lornis will bring that thing in the house? I'm going to go
find something I think will help us. Mio, come with me, I need your
fingers."

Mio looked to his mistress, who nodded, and the two of us went
ahead into the house. I indicated a drawer in Eichra Oren's desk I
wanted opened, and the Talapoin obliged, letting me see what he saw
inside, via implant. It was almost like having a symbiote of my very
own.

It was getting to be an attractive thought, although it would
probably take the Elders seven or eight milennia to get used to the
idea.

At my instruction, Mio pulled out the flat transparent package
with Ray's brain implants on the foam inside it. By that time the boss
and his would-be girlfriend had the captive Gray inside the house and
propped up on the sofa like a particularly icky mummy. When Eichra
Oren saw what we'd retrieved from his desk drawer, he nodded his
approval.

"Ray's implants!" he said. "You'll want the language package
that's the little purple square one. You're figuring that this
creature's neural functions are distributed widely enough that we can
just lay the implant practically anywhere on its skin and get results,
right?"

"I'd start with the head," I told him, conservative in my own way.

He answered, "So would I, if only out of habit." I had no idea
whether this idea of mine would work. I didn't know whether implants
could attune themselves to their users or had to be attuned, somehow.
It occurred to me then that I knew almost nothing about the technology
that had made me what I amwhatever that is. Eichra Oren took the
little metallic wafer out of the package and laid it on the creature's
forehead. Nothing happened for a longish momentthen it jumped
and suddenly each of us could sense another sapient presence in the
room.

"I am Eichra Oren," the boss said aloud. His implant broadcast the
same information. He'd pulled up an office chair so he could sit and
look directly at our guest where they'd sat him on the sofa. "Who are
you?"

There came no reply, either mentally or otherwise. The alien sat
perfectly still, and if implants had employed carrier waves, that's
all we would have been hearing. That and crickets. But somehow we were
all aware that the bizarre creature had heard Eichra Oren's question
perfectly well. My guess was that it believed it was resisting an
interrogation by its captors, and, of course, that's exactly what was
happening.

"This is the last time I'm asking," said Eichra Oren, his voice
and mental tone extremely grim and menacing. I could tell that he was
putting it on, but I doubt the prisoner or even Lornis could. "Who are
you?"

Again there was no answer from our alien visitor, but the creature
began thrashing around violently, straining hard at the gray utility
tape wrapped around its wrists and arms and legs and anklesor as
close as it came to having parts like that. Maybe it thought it was
worth tearing itself to bits in order to get away. It wasn't entirely
gelatinous, more like cold meatloaf in aspic. Perhaps it had gotten a
mental glimpse of what Eichra Oren wanted it to believe he had in
mind.

I had, and it wasn't pretty. I probably would have felt a lot more
sympathy for the thing if I hadn't watched through Ray's own eyes as
it, or one of its buddies, coldbloodedly murdered my friendafter
attempting to run the boss and me off the road and firing a missile at
us.

With a hand on its chest, Eichra Oren pushed the creature back
against the sofa. He pulled the little plasma weapon out of his tunic
pocket and pointed it at the crotch of the creature's gray coveralls.
"This is what I wrecked your veek and shot your aircraft down with.
Now sit still and tell me everything I want to know, or I'm going to
shoot your dick off. This is a new gun to me, and it's just a little
bit unpredictable, so I'll most likely take your balls off with it,
too."

"My reproductive process is not the same as that of you mammals."
The voice inside our minds was amused, low, smooth, and sexually
ambiguous. "And if it were, even a lowly vertebrate like you should be
aware by now that anything you do to me will eventually heal or grow
back."

"It won't do any good," I told Eichra Oren, unable now to tell how
serious he was being. Tortureand the threat of torture, toowas
supposed to be against the rules of p'Na. "This could be the same one
that Ray shot. They seem able to absorb a lot of abuse. Every function
is distributed throughout their bodies and I'll bet they also heal
fast."

The boss nodded. "Right you are, Sam." He stood up, put his gun
away, and went to the kitchen. He came back immediately with a small
container in his hand. "This is a highly volatile petroleum fraction,"
he announced. In fact, it was only a bottle of Plumfizzle, the boss's
favorite soft drink. "I'm going to take you outside, pour it all over
you, and light it. Then we'll see how well-distributed your functions
are."

The thing said, "Wait, wait, what is it that you want to know?" So
our guest didn't care much for the idea of being set on fire. For that
matter, neither did I, not just because I hate the smell of burning
fur.

Eichra Oren said, "Who are you?"

"I don't know how to answer this question of yours, vertebrate,"
it complained. "I don't understand it. I am myself. What else could I
be?"

"To begin with, what's your name? My name is Eichra Oren. His name
is Oasam Otusam. Her name is Lornis Adubudu. His name is Mio. What's
yours?"

"'Name'," it repeated, almost to itself. "You give each cell a
unique designation all its own. How mind-consuming that must be,
remembering and employing all of those letter combinations. This is
better:"

Instead of more words, we vertebrates were treated mentally to a
complicated and confusing diagram. There was a long silence, then:
"That's genealogy," Lornis said at last. "That's some kind of family
tree."

"It's telling us who it is," Mio said, "in terms of its familial
relationships."

"Let me try something," said Lornis. She closed her beautiful eyes
and concentrated. What we saw was a considerably less complicated
diagram showing the last three generations of the Adubudu family. For
some reason the creature suddenly began thrashing around violently
again.

"Alfarz," I observed. "It seems to focus on Alfarz Adubudu."

Lornis said, "My father. I think this thing wants to kill him."

Alfarz Adubudu was a businessman who specialized in catering to
certain proclivities of which many individuals would be ashamed were
they to become public knowledge. Pass a thousand laws, I thought,
repeal them all; none has even a hundredth of the power of social
approval or disapproval. If Alfarz were living in a civilization
somewhere that outlawed the proffering of such goods and services,
he'd have been considered a criminal kingpin. As it was, he did
moderately well by supplying individuals with what they thought they
needed.

Eichra Oren leaned in on the creature. "Why would you kill Alfarz
Adubudu?"

As before, we didn't get an answer in words, but in flashes, brief
glimpses of Alfarz, of Semlohcolresh in Lanternlight, of Lyn Chow, of
Hyppod Zart and his fellow tentacle-nosed friends, and oddly enough of
Scutigera, and of Eichra Oren's mother, Eneri Relda, each of them
associated in its mind somehow with Misterthoggosh. There were also
certain characters we recognized, but didn't know: Asavivirsnajunamar
("THE name in Anti-Gravity"), another famous Elder, Semajytrairom, a
media commentator, and Nombismocwen, who manufactured hoverveeks like
Lornis's. There was a number of others, of several species, we didn't
know.

"It doesn't seem to understand how we organize ourselves," Lornis
suggested. "My mom died a couple of years ago, climbing a mountain on
the Northwest Continent. Maybe it thought my dad lives in that tool
shed." That was funny for a couple of reasons. Among Lornis's people,
Homo gracilis, houses traditionally belong to the womenfolk, passing
from mother to daughter, which was probably why he'd wanted his own
place.

"Stop me when I go wrong," said Mio, ticking points off on his
tiny Talapoin fingers. "What we have here are some violent criminals,
killers of an unfamiliar speciesthese Grayswho are apparently
descended from flatworms, have independently discovered crosstime
travel, and are now here with some kind of list of people they want to
kill."

"All because they have something to do with Misterthoggosh," I
observed, wondering why I hadn't seen Aelbraugh Pritsch, Jakdav Hoj,
or Mikado in the alien's mental rogues' gallery. Unimportant, I
guessed. "The person in this world who has the most to do with other
worlds."

Eichra Oren rose. "Sam, my mother isn't picking up, but she often
turns her com off. Let's head over to her place and make sure she's
all right. Maybe she can tell us why she's on this strange creature's
list. Along the way, we'll call the others and alert them to the
danger."

"Mio and I will help with that," said Lornis. "We'll go with you,
if you don't mind, Eichra Oren, Sam. I'd feel a whole lot safer. I'm
associated with Misterthoggosh, too, after all, through my father.
I'll send my veek home. I'm in contact with my dad this very minute.
He's doing business on the Island Continent and assures me he's just
fine."

She'd asked if I minded. Push that "I wish I were human" up a
notch.

"I thought you said you were going fishing with Alfarz today," the
boss informed her, rather than asking her, pretending to be a
detective. The man seemed desperate to find some reason not to like
this beautiful girl who wanted nothing more than to give herself to
him.

Lornis replied, "Tonight. He's taking a ballistic flight home."
That's the way to travel, I thought. Half a world away in ninety
minutes.

I decided that the subject could use changing. "Boss, what're we
gonna do with Captain Wormface, here? Gonna introduce it to your
mother?"

Eichra Oren laughed, "On the way over, we'll drop it off with
Misterthoggosh. He may have an idea or two of what to do with the
creature."

The alien flatworm thing freaked when it heard that. Back it went,
into the trunk, not peacably, but kicking and wriggling without making
a noise. Eichra Oren drove. Lornis sat beside him in the passenger
seat.

I sat behind her on the vestigial back seat with the Hammer-damned
monkey.